Dear friends,
A milestone has come and gone. Yup on September 23, I turned 64. Why is this a milestone? Well it has nothing to do with Social Security or retirement, it has to do with the “snapshot.”
OK, so I might as well start from the beginning . . .
Back in the summer of 1967, I was washing dishes and working in the kitchen at Hull House Art and Music Camp in East Troy, Wisconsin midway between Milwaukee and Chicago. There were probably 30 of us guys ranging from 16 to mid-20s living in a barracks at this camp, and we all either worked in the kitchen or did maintenance on the grounds.
Anyway, everyone in the '60s (as many of you Baby Boomers remember well) used to wait with bated breath for each new Beatles' release. Word was out that the Fab Four had just released the successor to their "Revolver" album, and it was called "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." So three of us guys drove into Whitewater and found the LP at a drugstore. I bought it and brought it back to the barracks where about 20 of us guys huddled around a small, portable record player and listened attentively to both sides of this record. I don't think any one of us even took a breath for 45 minutes! As the bombastic, final chord faded out at the end of A Day In The Life, we all just stood there wide-eyed and silent. We didn't know it at the time, but we had just listened to an album that was destined to change the course of popular music and culture like nothing that had come before it.
At the end of the summer when I returned home to Iowa, I thought it would be "cool" to have my dear, gray-haired Grandma Traeger hold the album cover while I took her picture. Of course the obvious significance would be was that she was 64 at the time and that one of the album's most memorable tunes was When I'm Sixty Four.
So for decades I've considered this campy photo to be wrought with significance. I'd snapped a Polaroid of my "elderly” grandmother holding a hip, contemporary piece of pop culture featuring a song referencing having reached one's golden years:
"When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four?"
Throughout the nearly 50 years since this picture was taken, I've frequently glanced at it sitting in a frame on my bookshelf - a constant reminder of that one moment frozen in time when I was 16 and my grandmother indulged my youthful exuberance by dutifully clutching Sgt. Pepper while I eagerly snapped her picture.
Now fast-forward to August 2014. I literally awoke from a sound sleep with the jarring revelation: "I'm turning 64 in a month!! I'm finally as old as my dear grandmother! Shouldn't I do something to commemorate this milestone?" So I figured it was only fitting that on my birthday I should I set the self-timer on my camera and prop up Sgt. Pepper on my lap to recreate Grandma's iconic pose for the next generation or two - perhaps for my young nieces who will someday also realize with a start that the years have flown by and that Father Time eventually creeps up on us all!
Like the Beatles’ song goes:
"Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, braaaaa
La-la how the life goes on!!"
Regards,
Doug Koempel | Thurs, Sept 23, 2014 | 
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